Runescape Videos

Many runescape players enjoy making videos to document their ingame activities and to share the experience with other players. This isn't new and has been done my people before youtube was used.

There are many video hosts that enable players to upload and share their game experiences easily, although yotube is likely the most popular - it is also easy for webmasters to embed video content into their websites that help spread the popularity of runescape.

Any player wishing to make their own runescape video should be aware that they should only ever upload videos that are within Jagex rules, otherwise they may risk their youtube account along with their actual runescape account.

I do have plans to try and get a lot more good runescape videos onto my blogs and main runescape help site - although real life has left things very hectic for me and development is not as fast as I would ideally hope. Maybe some players out there would like to help me get achieving this goal by providing some regular videos they wish to share.

Watch the latest videos on YouTube.com

Dark Bow Not Yet Obtained

Since Jagex released the Dark Bow into Runescape I have spent plenty of time fighting at the Dark Beasts in pursuit of a Bow. However, as yet, almost one week later I still have not been fortunate enough to get a Dark Bow in a drop.

According to almost everyone else I have spoken to during my week or so fighting the Dark Beasts, I must have the worst luck in runescape. Almost everyone else has had multiple drops (ranging from 2 - 12).

Initially I had hoped to get a few drops and be able to sell at a higher price. However, as time has passed by and I still haven't managed to get even one in a drop, the price has been the only thing dropping. It is almost at the point where it will be pointless selling should I be lucky enough to get a drop soon.

Maybe next week.

Shoutbox Added

I have added a shoutbox to the forums so that members who are logged in will be able to chat between themselves (and to me) when I am online.

The forums themselves are not being used as much as was anticipated - afterall, I was asked by a few members to install some forums and am left wondering why those members who requested them haven't used them.

Anyway, I will push forward with working on more runescape guides and I am likely to make basic guides initially. The reason is so each section can be filled with basic information initially and anyone who wants to be a guide writer can help to improve existing guides etc.

This way, more information is available for all runescape players and it should help make the site overall much more useful.

Runescape Forum Added

After being requested to add a forum to the runescape help site I integrated a forum into the existing help site that meant registered users did not have to re-register in order to be able to post. However, there are not many people making use of the forum and it has been somewhat disappointing as it was a requested feature to add to make the overall runescape help site more interactive and gather more feedback.

Adding to this, I still require more runescape guide writers who are wanting to submit their guides, tips or even comments on existing runescape guides in order to make the overall site more useful. There is no long term committment expected, however, any guide written should meet the basic requirements and should be 250 words or more - they can include pictures to help break up any text.

April / May I plan to work through all the mini game guides for runescape and ensure that a guide exists for each on on the main help site. Any help is appreciated if you already have a guide written or if you have a favourite mini-game, then help this become reality by the end of may.

Any other guides may be submitted in the mean time as there are many runescape guides still required in order to make the overall runescape help site more useful. After the mini-games have been completed I will look at another aspect and then aim to complete that section.

Runescape Guide Writers

Guide writers for runescape are indeed a rare entity. Through the creation of my site I have been approached by many people who desired to write plenty of guides to be published - however, when asked to actually write a guide they have not returned or have simply tried to copy a guide from another runescape fan site and claim it as their own guide.

Without doubt, the biggest burden of my time has been trying to establish a good guide writing team who will be dedicated to helping me realise a complete runescape help site.

The overall task is enormous by myself and the progress is somewhat slower than I had anticipated - as real life comes into play and the time available is reduced significantly when I am practically the sole provider of guides.

I have found one consistent guide writer in Aj that has taken care of the free to play quest guides in runescape, although there are still many more areas that need to be covered in greater detail.

Currently I am looking to finish off the price guides that were initially inspired by Tomisme from the main runescape forums and after that I will look to get some information in each of the main categories on my runescape help site.

If there are any budding runescape guide writers wishing to be part of my guide writing team they can contact me via msn or via my main help site contact form. I do not expect someone to come in and write every guide available, although I do expect that any guide writer will be able to provide a decent quality guide from some aspect of runescape.

Most guides that have been rejected either fail to cover anything to any significant degree or are simply a copy from another fan site. The basic requirement for any guide to be accepted is that it should cover one topic or one aspect of the game that provides sufficient detail to warrant inclusion as a standalone guide (or mini-guide) depending on the topic it covers.

Overall, the website attracts consistently over 100 new people per day but I have not been able to concentrate on promoting it as I am too busy trying to get the background info updated and new guides online to make the site more complete. If anyone wants to help me promote the site or write some guides then they only need to get in contact as I do need all the help I can get.

Thanks,
Latona

Runescape Affiliate Advertising

On 21st October I migrated all the information from my original runescape site onto my new runescape help site. I have also looked at the adserving features for the associated runescape blogs and have now implemented banner adserving throughout my mini network.

The next step is looking to increase the potential affiliate sites that will agree to run advertising throughout their sites - and for them to check if they are able to implement or integrate it into their site.

At this stage, there is no direct advertisers available and the main adverts that are running are affiliate based. This is primarily to have some adverts running in order to gather up more information and statistics to be able to approach others for direct advertising opportunities.

Once sufficient statistics have been gathered up I will be in a better situation to assess the demographics of visitors to the network and as a result will be able to identify direct advertisers - which will help ensure long term development of both the site and the network.

Runescape Merchandise

Runescape is a very popular MMORPG and with it there has been some merchandise brought out by players that can be bought as gifts for special occasions such as birthdays or christmas.

I have added the ability for people to check a selection of the items available on my runescape help site and it has its own section - runescape merchandise.

I plan to add further direct links as I continue to develop the help site and I am currently looking at implementing a banner rotation to my site (as well as related blogs) that will carry direct links to various merchandise available for runescape.

I am also considering offering some merchandise myself, although I haven't quite looked into designing them yet as I am working on several different aspects of my site behind the scenes. I do intend to keep this section updated on the development, although it will likely be sporadic posting rather than any set pattern.

Runescape Search Engine

There are numerous useful Runescape help sites available on the internet, however, it is not practical to be able to search each one individually when trying to find what you want. This is the reason why I have started a Runescape Search Engine that I believe will enable all runescape players to find whatever they desire about runescape.

The idea is that over time I will ensure only quality runescape help sites are included in the runescape search engine. This means any query within Jagex rules should easily be resolved by browsing the results or entering more specific search criteria to get what you need.

It is much better than the previous runescape community search that I was using as the new search will be taking results from websites that I include in the index whereas the previous search was taking results from the whole web, many of which were not relevant to runescape users.

An additional benefit is that any user can simply type the word they are want to find help on without the need to have runescape in front of it - this can bring much better results in context (although sometimes it may be required to put runescape in front of a query if the results are not specific enough to resolve your isssues).

Hopefully all runescape players will see an enormous benefit from adding my new runescape search engine to their favourites list (bookmarking it or whatever), and using it anytime they have a specific runescape query.

Happy surfing and scaping (or surfscaping).
Latona

New Site Name and Testing new Search

I have now restructured my original help site and relaunched it on its own domain name.

The new site can be found at : http://www.runescape-help.net/

The new runescape search facility is part of Google Co-Op and adds to what was previously being used as now I can add and remove the sites that should contain all the results that runescape players want.

The added control that is offered by the Co-Op enables me to ensure results are better suited to the community needs and wishes and enables me to exclude sites that are obviously of no use whatsoever.

As I add and refine the pages and sites to include in the results of the community search, they will become much more useful.

In addition, on my new runescape help site any player wishing to write any runescape guides can simply register and submit their guide for approval. Again, over time this will enable my own site to much better handle the requirements of the runescape player community.

Latona.

ps. Remember to bookmark my new help site - http://www.runescape-help.net/

pps. Remember to tell your friends about my new site as well so that they can contribute any guides they may want to make as well.

***Update***

Since Jagex announced EoC I let the domain name expire and as such the main site is no longer live. There is a host of other runescape fan sites containing a wealth of information that need user participation to continue being useful to the runescape community. A friend has started a wiki site dedicated to 07 runescape at http://07.runescape.com and I am sure will gladly accept any help building up the site content.

Social Bookmarking

I have added social bookmarking below each post as this is a growing aspect of websites - especially blog style websites. It will enable people to add to their social bookmarks page and share with their friends. It is kinda similar in style to viral marketing, but instead of informing your friends of interesting sites, you are letting your friends find sites that appeal to you.

Below each post is 10 social bookmarking links that will allow people to add to their favourites and share with their friends. There are many more social bookmarking sites available on the internet, however, I felt 10 was sufficient for now and have chosen some of the more popular ones to prevent too much clutter at the end of posts.

Hopefully in the long term, the social bookmarking, viral marketing and constant development of links and content will help make the process of establishing my runescape helpsite a lot easier.

I have had a few ups and downs in the search rankings, and there is a considerably higher number of people that visit the main site when I make an appearance in some of the top pages - however, still relatively young for a website, I quickly disappear in the search results again and then only a handful of people find the site.

I have noticed though, that around 10% or so of visitors come back to this site again, whether they find it through a different search term, or have it bookmarked. I do encourage people to bookmark the main site at least as it will give you access to all the blogs associated with the site also and can act as a kind of runescape portal.

Viral Marketing

Since I have introduced several blogs to cover various aspects of Runescape, I was hoping to have the word of my site spread further among the runescape players. However, the main way of finding my site still appears to be through search engines.

I have registered on some forums and tried to make an appearance on some to get the word out that my site exists. Although daily traffic appears to increase slowly but steadily, the main problem is still with getting the site more interactive via the forums or any of the blogs.

For anyone reading this particular post, they can help my site by telling their friends - this is the viral marketing aspect. The blogs offer an ideal way for people to tell their friends about my website existing, as they can simply forward a link to their friend via email (the picture of the letter below each post makes it even easier).

Basically, if any readers find any of my posts interesting or useful, or even some parts of the site, then I would appreciate it if you could share this with your friends and forward any posting that you feel would be of interest to them.

As always, I am on the lookout for guide writers and am especially interested in quest guide writers as I am looking to add more content to my main site over the next few months in the hope of catching up to the same level of content as other established sites. Any help to achieve this is appreciated, so I ask if you know anyone that is wanting to write guides, or has already written guides, then let them know about my site.

Thanks.

Latona.

ps. Dont forget to bookmark my site and visit regularly as I plan to update both the main site and the associated blogs on a regular basis.

pps. Dont forget to tell your friends :P

Another Launch?

I recently found an interesting site that lets you edit in and make your own Newspaper Clipping. I thought I would try it out and see what it looked like.

Here is the result - it took me a couple of minutes but it looks ok.

Website Promotion

Over the last month since launching my site I have undergone 3 site re-designs due to internet explorer not following the W3C standards and thereby causing some issues with the overall look.

I have settled on a simple design that has so far been fluid on all screen resolutions and browsers. I hope this will continue to be the case as it really has detracted from me adding more quality content guides about runescape. I know I have a lot of work to do to catch up with the established help sites, but it is gradually getting there.

Originally this blog was going to be solely about the development of my runescape help site and how to get a foothold into the playerbase given the amount of paranoia around new runescape sites coupled with the advertising ban ingame ... it is truely a challenge to get established as a honest source of help.

I realise now that it is impossible to solely keep on topic, but I have created additional blogs about various aspects of runescape and I will use those blogs to keep on topic and provide an informative niche area within the game.

This blog will therefore become more of my general views on any aspects within the game, any aspects with my site development and any other aspects relating to site promotion and becoming established as an entity.

One main problem is the ability of bad websites to gain a lot of traffic playing against the rules of the major search engine guidelines but at the same time outranking my site that I am trying to develop in the true spirit of the web. I continually become disheartened when I see other bogus sites outranking mine, especially on google where my site has virtually disappeared and sites that copied some of my content outrank me due to them having been in existence before my site... truely demoralising.

A new Runescape Marketplace is afoot

Currently I am working on a new runescape marketplace that I am hoping to give some interactivity to my website and some usefulness to the people visiting it. The numbers of visitors has been increasing daily since starting to show on some google search results. Hopefully this is a good sign and that it continues in the same direction.

The marketplace will ideally serve as an alternative to runescape forums themselves ad people will find great use from them. Time is yet to tell if it will catch on and help people in runescape to find the items they are after.

Edited: I abandoned the marketplace system as the script was no longer being supported and I was unable to get a reply as to whether or not I would be able to adapt the script for my purposes.